Adding "noindex" to older posts

[Sergi973]

I'd like to add a NoIndex meta tag in the header for posts older than 6 months. I've got a lot of them and the content is no longer relevant. I want to keep them but remove them from the Google Index.

Is there a proper way to do it, maybe a buit-in Wordpress function ?

I would like to avoid unnecessary and heavy database query or another plugin.

Thanks for any input.

[rogerd]

I've never seen anything like this, although there are date-related functions that do things like remove the post date on older posts to avoid having them appear dated. This is particularly true with Google displaying post date right in the results. To add the noindex to older posts, I think you'd need to add a conditional statement in the header. Good caching should minimize any minimal performance hit.

Do these older pages generate no traffic that could be useful to the site? Perhaps you could leave them in the index and beef up cross-linking to current content. That way, if someone hit the "obsolete" page they would have some relevant choices to reach your newest content.

[rogerd]

By the way, welcome back, Sergi973! Long time no see!

[Sergi973]

Thanks rogerd,

I went with the conditional statement in header.php

Those pages generate very few traffic and really are outdated (pasts events). I want to keep them for references and because some of them have inbound links but there is really no need for them to appear in the search engines index anymore. And they represent quite a big percentage of the total content.

I'll keep them but warn the reader of the outdated content and prominently display related current events to help them find what they are looking for. I'll see how it goes.